How to Name Characters in Plays

Video Transcript

STEVE CAVERNO: I'm Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about building a character. Okay, to quote Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name?" Well, we'll look at some names, try to decipher what they might be in. Let's say you're writing the farcical comedy and you want to come up with a character. Maybe you'll name him Bob Slob. Okay, that's--it's a play on words, it rhymes. You're not really going to find Bob Slob in a tragic drama about the human condition and something that explores the universal elements of humanity and death and mortality. This is going to be a weird incorporation in that. Similarly, Victoria Ellington is a very proper-sounding name. You're probably not going to have Victoria Ellington as a high school teenager; it's going to be kind of a little bit too Victorian-sounding. You'll probably have this character in a Victorian drama or you're thinking of Queen Victoria. You see, this is another thing: names recall characters. So if you have a Queen--if you have Victoria, it's going to incorporate different characters such as--let say you had James Iago. Well, James can be a nice guy, can be--it can be anyone. James is a very normal American name. But if you add Iago to the end of it, then you'll find a different name. If you add--let's see--James Kent, then it creates Clark Kent. So you look at James and you think, "Oh, hey he's the Superman." So this is a way where you can add a name to the end of a name, add the last name to a traditional American English name and find a different motivation with that name, discovering the different ways that names are incorporated. Also, if you had a name, Alfredo Romano, all right this guy is probably going to be an Italian guy. He could kinda--it brings up food, so when you're thinking about Alfredo, you're thinking about Alfredo...Fetuccini Alfredo, you're thinking about cheese. So that can play on this. You can kind of incorporate that character into that setting, and these are ways in which you develop a name into a character.

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